1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to ceramic structured (or monolith) packing for use as heat-sink media in regenerative heat-exchangers.
2. Description of the Related Art
The applicant currently produces and successfully markets ceramic structured packing, which is assembled from a plurality of individual plates. Each of these plates has ribs, which are interleaved with the ribs on adjoining plates to produce serpentine cross-sectioned flow channels. Details of the structured packing, which is marketed under the trade-name MLM®, are available in the applicant's web-site at www.lantecp.com.
The operating performance of the MLM has been proved to be vastly superior to that of traditional structured packing which generally have square flow passages (with an aspect-ratio equal to one) or rectangular flow passages or triangular flow passages. Details of such traditional structured packing are available from the websites of manufacturers such as www.rauschert.com, www.ceram.fraunthel.com, and others. It is postulated that the superior performance of the MLM® over traditional structured packing is due to the serpentine cross-section of the flow channels in the MLM®.
However, the present method of manufacturing MLM® is from individual ribbed plates is both time-consuming and expensive because it involves the manual gluing of thousands of individual plates even for a small commercial quantity.
The inventor has therefore devised a process of manufacturing a MLM®-type structured packing which is extruded as a single block but which still retains the same configuration for the flow channels as the prior-art glued-together MLM® structured packing.